School closings: With more empty spaces in its schools than Toronto has seats in its domed stadium, Southwestern Ontario has no easy way out of the tough math.

The threatened school behind him, Ashley Chapman of Chapman’s Ice Cream says losing Beavercrest community school in small-town Markdale, near Owen Sound, would be the community’s death knell. The company has pledged $2 million to help keep the school open. (Rob Gowan/Postmedia News)

If the two cartoon kids in the Chapman’s Ice Cream logo were real, they’d be pupils at Beavercrest community school in Markdale.

After all, the Southwestern Ontario company is trying to spare the low-enrolment school from the chopping block.

The town’s biggest employer, the ice-cream maker has waded into an agonizing issue for many in Ontario — the battle to save half-empty schools — after staff at the Bluewater District school board recommended closing the school, southeast of Owen Sound.

But what makes this fight different is cash — money outsiders are willing to pony up to save the school.

Beavercrest, with 192 pupils, is less than 40 per cent full.

“Losing the school — it might not be a quick a death for this community, but it would still lead to the eventual death of Markdale,” said Ashley Chapman, the company’s vice-president.

Chapman’s pledged $2 million to save Beavercrest, which has been at the heart of the Grey County town of 1,300 for more than 65 years.

Toronto-area developer Parataxis matched that amount. First, the businesses offered to buy the school. Then, they toyed with building a new one. The municipality chimed in, the community too. In April trustees voted to give the school a one-year reprieve while they weigh its future.

“This place — this town called Markdale — has helped us build what we’ve built in 44 years of business,” Chapman said. “We need the school in town so we can keep people in the area.”

Beavercrest’s backing is unique, but its story is not. The school so many in Markdale are fighting to save could be anywhere in Ontario.

Across Ontario, enrolment is falling and old schools are getting older. But for hundreds of under-used schools, no amount of community grit and gumption can change the cold hard demographics — or the costs — that have put them on a death bed.

Over the last 20 years, Ontario’s $24-billion education system has lost more than 102,000 students — more than the entire population of Chatham-Kent.

Provincewide, there are nearly half a million surplus spaces in schools.

For a system with just under two million kids, that’s essentially one empty desk for every four with kids.

In Southwestern Ontario, there are nearly 55,000 surplus spaces — more than enough to fill Toronto’s Rogers Centre stadium.

Staggering figures, they’re also a huge financial hit to school boards.

So, how did we get here, and is there a way out?

The first question is easy: The education system ballooned with the post-war baby boom, but now must serve a province with fewer kids than seniors.

Trickier, is how to get out. With hundreds of half-empty schools still on the books, including in big cities, no one — not even with a provincial election coming next year — is promising a quick fix for the gut-wrenching decisions facing school boards.

“Generally speaking, they’re funded for the number of students that they have, which means it’s difficult for boards to maintain schools that are under-utilized,” said Doug Reycraft, a former Southwest Middlesex mayor and chair of the Community Schools Alliance, a rural school advocacy group.

Empty spaces in schools aren’t just a rural issue: The Toronto District school board is dealing with about 58,000 of its own.

But Reycraft, a former teacher and former Liberal MPP, said community schools like Beavercrest are often hit the hardest.

“If you close a school in London or St. Thomas, there’s a good chance there’s another school 10 or 15 minutes away. But if you close a school in a rural community that only has a single school, it means an increase in bus time for students,” he said.

Decades of families having fewer children and of governments playing politics with schools — including temporary bans on closings, policy reviews and changes — have contributed to the issue.

“We basically have a bunch of schools that were built to support a population boom in the 1950s and ‘60s,” said Jack Ammendolia, a Mississauga-based education consultant who’s worked for several Southwestern Ontario boards.

“Come the early 1970s,” he said, “fertility rates basically fall off a cliff” — starting the erosion of the school-age population.

The latest national census underlines that, citing “continuously low” fertility rates since the 1970s and reliance on immigrants for population growth.

But there’s another big reason school-age kids are in short-supply.

“You went through this whole generation where, between the boom and the echo was this bust,” said David Foot, a University of Toronto demographer and economist who’s made a career of tracking the baby boom. “And then there were fewer mothers to have kids 20 or 25 years later.”

Boomers’ children — their ‘echo’ — are now having kids, but they’re mostly under age six.

The new generation won’t save the schools built for the boomers, Foot noted. Many are more than 50 years old and not up to modern needs.

“You have schools that are too big, in some cases. You have schools in the wrong place, compared to how people have settled, and you have schools that can be in bad condition, as well,” added Ammendolia. “That’s sort of the trifecta — wrong size, wrong place and bad condition.”

There’s no clear or easy way out, said Ammendolia.

Complicating the issue, some boards have both falling enrolment in some schools and overcrowding in others.

Running a school comes with fixed cost and a provincial funding system — often criticized — that hinges on enrolment. Even though $200 million is earmarked to help remote schools or ones facing falling enrolment, it’s not nearly enough to save all doomed schools.

“The funding formula is incentivizing boards to close schools and that’s got to stop,” said London MPP Peggy Sattler, the NDP education critic.

Mergers and closings, often with new consolidated schools built, are the go-to options for boards — but that doesn’t have to be, some say.

Community centres combining adult education programs, day cares, libraries and the like, can help to fill under-used schools, alternatives the government encourages boards to pursue. But when those options are exhausted, trustees have to make tough calls.

“Sometimes, school consolidation might be the answer,” said Ammendolia.

With seniors expected to make up nearly one in four Canadians by 2031, Foot has another idea: Bring aging boomers back to the schools built for them.

“I used to say turn the schools into seniors’ apartments. Let the local hospital buy the school and use them as outpatient clinics,” he said.